From Russia with Lunch (13 page)

This was a happy place of arcing champagne corks and camera flashes, of side-faced hugs to avoid disturbing a little too much make-up. On the cobbled courtyard, stretch Hummers stood alongside pumpkin-style horsedrawn coaches and extravagantly finned fifties Cadillacs in cherry red. Also popular were dinky little four-seaters bearing the marque Zimm. A status symbol in Soviet times, these nuggety sedans – think of a Morris Minor with a charisma bypass and you'll get the idea – have taken on kitsch appeal for a generation reared on iPods and Facebook. All the wedding vehicles did, however, have one thing in common. They were adorned with dozens of fresh flowers. In addition to a wreath of roses and daises that sat atop the bonnet, floral ribbons were affixed to the flanks of the hire cars in motifs that ranged from waves to circles.

The majority of groomsmen were decked out in top hats and dawn-grey morning coats while the grooms opted for black, often worn with a gold brocade waistcoat, matching cravat and a medal at the throat. The bridal wear was more diverse and ran the gamut from alpine princess complete with white fur muff to silky sheaths that relied heavily on Hollywood Tape. Each radiated her own exquisiteness and it was no small pleasure to wander amid dozens of gracious women whose big day was unfolding precisely as they had hoped. Although I clearly belonged to none of the parties, I was on several occasions plied with champagne and on several more inadvertently wandered into photographic portraits: ‘And that's Uncle Marty and Aunty Irene. Cousin Ira and his wife Maxine. The confused looking guy in the jeans and glasses? He's not one of mine. I thought he was one of yours?'

Certain wedding universals began to present themselves. The first was the poses. Cue groomsmen in sunglasses, groom hugging wife from behind, shot taken through the back window of the hire car, husband and wife awkwardly drinking champagne from intertwined arms and my personal favourite: bride with her back against a wall looking down the lens while her new husband leans against said wall and gazes longingly at his bride.

Then there were the bridesmaids. The custom of outfitting this element of the retinue in identical outfits doesn't hold in Lithuania. Instead, the deal seems to be same dress, your choice of colour. Suffice to say, metallic lime, blue that is not so much electric but nuclear and hyper-saturated magenta are pretty hot in the Baltics right now. As are sleeveless gowns of Thai silk whose design inspiration was sourced directly from my grandmother's toilet roll holder. Also popular were dresses which seemed to be the creation of a profoundly schizophrenic tailor in that they had boned bustiers up top and shredded tutus down south. On top of this, these poor women struggled to make their way over cobblestones in barely broken-in stilettos.

This may seem like an odd time to bring this up, but please bear with me. Lithuanians have marvellously luxuriant hair. It may have something to do with their calcium-rich diet or the fact that nuclear power – courtesy of a station of the same vintage and design as that at Chernobyl – diminishes pollution caused by fossil fuels. Either way, it grows long, lustrous and cascades over women's shoulders in glossy waves or ringlets. Except when they are bridesmaids. On such occasions, mere hairstyling is not an option. Instead, it becomes sculpture as tresses are tonged, curled and lacquered into architectural submission. If you liked someone's else do, you could probably snap off a piece to take to your hairdresser. Detracting even more from the usual face presented by this naturally beautiful race was that the bridesmaids were uniformly tanorexic. By which I mean they spent so much time on solarium beds and/or applied such liberal quantities of tinted moisturisers that a significant portion of most retinues appeared to be the same shade as chicken tikka.

I repaired to a small café for lunch. The walls were blue, the furniture was cane and the light fittings loitered between reeds that hung from the ceiling. It was like eating in an inverted swamp. Mushroom season was in full swing and I took the waitress's recommendation of the soup of the day, which was made from ‘edible boletus'. Thank heavens they checked.

One of the very best aspects of travelling solo is that you get to observe coupling pairs and if my soup was an entrée then the main course was schadenfreude as the date unfolding before me was a doozey. She was a Princess Stephanie of Monaco lookalike who I guessed was newly divorced and back on the dating scene for the first time in years. I based my assumption on the fact that she subconsciously twirled the ring that was no longer on a once-occupied finger every time the conversation dried up. At these awkward junctures, the man concerned excused himself to smoke outside. Leaving her alone with her choices and half-empty wine-glass. I tried in vain to make some form of reassuring eye contact as I left but she was lost in memories and regret. Or maybe it was just booze.

My destination for the afternoon was the Lithuanian Open Air Museum, 25 kilometres to the east of Kaunas near the village of Rumsiskes – which is sort of a sequel to itself. The original settlement dates from the fourteenth century, but when Soviet authorities decided to flood the area in 1959 to create a dam they insist on calling the Kaunas Sea, it became a Baltic Atlantis. Only the eighteenth century wooden church and belfry were saved and brought to the new location on which rose Rumsiskes V2.

Established in 1966 over 175 hectares, the museum consists of some 180 buildings interspersed with deep gullies and oak forests that are hundreds of years old. It also borders the Kaunas Sea, making for a backdrop of rare tranquillity and beauty. Better still, there are no souvenir stands or bored teenagers in period dress pretending to converse in ye olde turns of phrase. Rather, it's as if you have found yourself in a village on a Sunday morning some time in the sixteenth century and everyone has gone to a church over the hill.

The buildings are arranged in groups according to the country's five ethnographic divisions: Dzukija, Zemaitija, Sudovia, Aukstaitija and Lithuania Minor. Each group focuses on a homestead complete with fences, gates, kennels, wells with sweeps, beehives, crosses and wayside shrines. This invites a process of compare and contrast which is made all the more enticing as great care has been taken to replicate the orchards, vegetable gardens and flowerbeds of each district. Meanwhile, an onsite stud farm ensures a plentiful population of the stocky ochre-coloured Samogi-tian horses upon which Lithuanian agriculture relied for centuries. Combined, this presents a comprehensive picture of life as it was in rural Lithuania from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century.

Behind rough fences of five wooden poles suspended horizontally from bolsters stand homesteads from the Dzukija region in the country's southeast. The buildings' grey walls are made from overlapping wooden sidings which nuzzle beneath thatched eves then rise to a triangular apex. Since stone was at a premium here, wooden blocks were often used as foundations. The interiors are sparse and functional with a compacted earth floor, an oven and two larders. They speak of a life consumed with the basics of survival: warmth, food, shelter. Closer to the towns, however, split board flooring was the norm as were communal courtyards and bathhouses where locals flagellated one another with birch switches while grain and flax dried around them. In village layouts, the dwelling house faced the street while in an enclosed yard out the back was a barn or granary.

Enveloped by fields of buttery buckwheat bloom sprayed with lavender was a memorial to Lithuanian deportees to Siberia in the form of a yurt. Resembling an overcooked meat loaf, these dwellings consisted of wooden frames covered in cloth and then daubed with moss gouged from the perma-frost ground. Forbidden from heating these drafty excuses for adequate shelter, deportees were forced to endure deplorable conditions and unimaginable cold. Writing in the Lithuanian
Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences
in 1990, Dalia Grinkeviciute recalled:

The barracks became a huge grave of ice; the ceiling was covered with ice, the walls and floor as well. Often while people were lying on the planks, their hair would freeze to the wall.

In November the polar nights began. People started to freeze to death, die of starvation, scurvy and other diseases. The others lay on their planks either swollen from starvation, or no longer able to get up because of exhaustion and scurvy. Everyone without exception suffered from scurvy. We received no vitamins. Our teeth crumbled painlessly and blood flowed from our gums. Chronic trophic ulcers, which were painful and didn't heal, appeared on our calves. Each day it became more difficult to walk because of our overall exhaustion and the haemorrhaging of blood into muscles and joints. It seemed as though dozens of needles had been stuck into your calves and each step brought pain. It was especially difficult to stand up in the morning. You could only get up on your tiptoes. Most of the time scurvy would affect the knee caps; because of the extreme haemorrhaging it was impossible to stretch one's legs out. Thus people were left lying on planks with their legs bent and with huge blue swollen joints. Often diarrhoea followed, then death.

The homes of the Aukstaitija region exuded a more prosperous air. Anything would. Here the compact thatching extended only to ceiling height and was buttressed by a continuous border of dainty wooden rectangles. Sanded shutters painted with green accents stood sentinel beside the windows and a quartet of fluid wooden columns supported a canopy above porches by the front door. Scalloped edges and arches were carved into the eaves and even the vertical pickets in the fences were shaped into vaguely threatening points in what I can only assume to be a deterrent to would-be burglars. In addition to a scattering of handsome and sturdy wooden barns, some even had a second storey and intricately carved wooden renditions of Mother Mary in the front yard.

Things went even more upmarket in the Zemaitija (Samogitian) district, with pin-neat gardens and exposed beamwork that would not look out of place in a New York loft. The sprawling properties also routinely boasted wooden stables, kennels, a cow shed, a pigsty, a hen house, a smokehouse and a bathhouse. The Samogitians were particularly adept at whipping up the odd four-storey shingled windmill. Rarely relying on architects, the locals also built wooden churches that often featured a rectangular nave, a projecting apse (an architectural term which sounds much like an orthodontic complaint) and a detached belfry which doubles as a gateway to the churchyard. When the baroque movement swept through Lithuania, wood was again used in this region to create twin towers and façade pediments. These have now buckled and bulged, resulting in houses of worship that appear in some spots to be retaining holy water.

Zemaitija was the Beverly Hills of historic Lithuanian architecture and the region's prosperity was whispered of by its buildings. Sheer bulk trumps detail in this neck of the Baltics. Here, the thatching has pretensions to topiary and the apex of the roofs are strutted with wooden triangular supports at either end. The roofs are also hipped or feature
ciukurai,
openings at both ends which are capped with smaller triangular coverings to allow smoke to escape but prevent rain from entering. The walls are formed by dovetailing stacks of single logs often in excess of ten metres long. There is a monumental solidity to these structures and once they were done they were done. No pissfarting around with extensions necessary.

The most imposing homestead in the museum hails from Zemaitija. Aside from the pair of granaries, cellar, cowshed and building housing an oven for baking bread, there is a manor house worthy of Hugh Hefner. It contains eleven whitewashed rooms, fourteen doors and a kitchen with its own chimney in the centre. On one end of the wooden manse are the living quarters, including a spacious master bedroom and guest accommodation. Down with the lackeys was a cosy apartment for the farmer's mistress. It seemed that for the wealthy, this woman's presence was simply a given. Another – but one which crossed all socioeconomic strata – was caring for elderly parents, as opposed to the ‘you'll love it, Mum, the retirement community has aquaro-bics on Tuesdays' chore that it has become in many societies. To this end, typical homes were built with a
lungine,
a room which traditionally received the most sunlight and warmth to compensate for the failing circulation and diminishing eyesight of the elderly.

Regardless of their origin or size, the traditional buildings of Lithuania never seemed at odds with the landscape. Rather, they were subsumed like a couple in an arranged marriage who had learned to love one another. Of the 180 buildings in the museum, 51 are open to visitors and these contain revealing insights into the domestic minutiae that might have unfolded between these wooden walls.

In the abodes of those who did it tough, work and living quarters were often one. Any aspirations to décor came from the woven blanket draped over a beam to dry or the rusting farm tools hanging from pegs on the wall. Suspended from the ceiling was often a woven baby's cradle. A couple of rungs up the money ladder, indulgences begin to take their place among the necessities: A4-sized finely wrought landscape paintings hang from corners where the timber beams meet; delicate triangles of handmade lace overlap at the tops of the windows and linen exquisitely embroidered in a mosaic motif sits on plump mattresses. At the top end of town, the day's ostentation was on display. Only in mid-nineteenth century Lithuania, this equated to a cuckoo clock, a palm-sized mirror in a carved wooden frame and turreted timber furniture finished in kahlua varnish and upholstered in oxblood velvet.

Speckled with reed-flecked ponds, the museum was crisscrossed by fences with a vast array of paling configurations. Suspended in rows, they sometimes resembled giant versions of the chocolate sticks my mother used to serve after dinner parties. In the Zemaitija style, however, locals opted for uneven ashen logs hung in casual diagonal symmetry against forked supports. Some fences contained reed-thin mocha branches arranged vertically from beams like a line of models backstage at a catwalk.